Hate crimes and the principle of guilt: a critical review of Günther Jakobs' normative functionalism. Discriminatory motivation, legal and judicial evidence, and criminal proportionality

Unlike ordinary offences, whose seriousness is determined primarily by the conduct and its material outcome, hate crimes incorporate a subjective, discriminatory dimension: the offender's motivation toward the victim's identity or status. The aim of this research is to critically examine the limits and contradictions of Günther Jakobs's normative functionalism as a foundation for the criminal-law treatment of hate crimes, with particular attention to the configuration of discriminatory motivation, the evidentiary assessment of such motivation in court, and the principle of proportionality in sentencing. A hermeneutic, document-based methodology was employed, supported by the systematic analysis of selected works by Jakobs and specialized secondary literature. The findings show that the Jakobsian model tends to subsume the discriminatory dimension under formal categories of imputation, which in some cases makes it difficult to grasp the specific content of hatred. It is concluded that the epistemological insufficiency of Jakobs's normative functionalism in relation to hate crimes is not a merely technical defect that could be remedied through minor conceptual adjustments, but rather a structural limitation stemming from its own epistemological premises.